Fiction against Intolerance: The Voices of the Wounded

Rujie Wang, College of Wooster

 

To some extent it can be said that the history of the twentieth-century China

is written in the blood of the victims of intolerance. Quite contrary to the

general belief that people became liberated from the oppression of traditions

in the course of social progress, the realities of Chinese modernization

sometimes prove just as oppressive and "cannibalistic." This paper examines

many acts of intolerance in modern Chinese fiction that depict the realities of

the Cultural Revolution and outlines the general struggle of modern Chinese

intellectuals to preserve humanity as defined in Confucianism.

 

The works written against the intolerance of the Cultural Revolution include,

"Scar," (Lu Xianhua, 1979), "Unrequited Love" (Bai Hua, 1979), "Bolshevik

Greetings, (Wang Meng, 1979), "Ah, Man!" (Dai Houying, 1980) "Six Chapters from

My Life in the Cadre's School" (Yang Jiang, 1981), "A Small Town Called

Hibiscus" (Gu Hua, 1983), and "Women Are One Half of Men" (Zhang Xianliang,

1985). Composed from within the intellectual tradition of the past and against

its values of religious tolerance, self-sacrifice, and social harmony, these

works are self-reflections of the revolutionary discourses responsible for the

deviation and perversion of human nature on a massive and unprecedented scale.

In these fictional works, we begin to see the "reasons" underlining much of the

atrocities, human indignities, and the destruction of the individual that come

to characterize the twentieth-century Chinese experience.